Kaylee shook her head sternly. “The Res doesn’t have to drug you. The Res itself is intoxicating. People with power go there to test themselves and pit themselves against each other. Mind readers especially love it because they can read everyone and feel lots of powers at once. Levitators and mind changers may look the strongest, but mind readers will back you into a corner. They’ll blackmail you into using your power the way they want. Your power is your weakness, and it will be your downfall. Remember that girl who jumped off Hoover Dam last week?”
Holly nodded. It seemed like a million years ago now, but she remembered hearing about that girl on the news. She remembered feeling jealous of her.
“I knew that girl.” Kaylee squinted at the monitors. “But I don’t recognize anybody on these screens, which worries me. Where did they go? Elijah’s mom is a weak mind reader, but when she does sense something, she’s right.”
“So you think the Res is coming for me?” Holly asked.
“That’s somewhat vain of you.” Kaylee eyed Holly. “The Res was poking around already. We’d planned to keep you and Elijah on Mentafixol until you were thirty years old—”
“Thirty!” Holly squealed.
“Yes, because your powers would start to fade by then. I took you off early because I need your help. Putting teenagers on Mentafixol makes sense if we’re only trying to protect you from yourselves. But now we think the Res is trying to take over the casino. We have very few people who can fight them. We’re drugging the people who are strongest. It’s dangerous to wean people off the drug, so I have to release one or two at a time. I chose you and Elijah first. I hope you’ll come to work for me.”
Holly lifted her hand for silence. “When hell freezes over. I’ll go find this Res and save us all the trouble.”
“No!” Kaylee shouted.
She had never shouted at Holly before, ever, and the shrill sound of her voice rattled Holly’s already shot nerves.
“Why the hell not?” Holly yelled back. “It doesn’t sound so bad when I think about all the shit you and my parents have put me through. Just for starters, all the edamame, Kaylee. My mom brainwashed me into purchasing and steaming my very own edamame even now that I’m out from under her roof, just to keep my weight down. Do you know how many cookies I’ve missed out on in the last seven years, all in the name of pleasing my parents despite my fake debilitating mental illness? God!”
“Well, there’s some good news. Now you can eat all the cookies you want.”
“Damn straight!” Holly said. “My parents can kiss my big dimpled ass.”
“No, I mean you really can,” Kaylee said. “Using your power boosts your metabolism. You can eat anything you want. Mentafixol slowed your metabolism, which is why your mom made you take ballet and kept on you about your weight. It’s also why Elijah’s mom put him in lacrosse and got him a job here as a carpenter. I mean, really that was so the casino could keep an eye on him, but it didn’t hurt that we made him carry a lot of plywood.”
Holly knew Kaylee was trying to lighten the mood with a joke. It wasn’t working. Holly was speechless with anger.
“It’s not that everyone at the casino’s been trying to control you,” Kaylee said gently. “Everyone’s been trying to keep you safe. Those of us with power remember what it was like to make that discovery when we were fourteen. A lot of us were lured into the Res at that age. We wanted to protect you from that. Most people can see this when we take them off Mentafixol. I think you and Elijah would see it, too, if you hadn’t gone off on your own for the past few days. And that’s my fault. This is the first withdrawal I’ve been in charge of, and I’ve screwed it up. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you because of what I’ve done. I’m your roommate and your friend, and I care about you.”
“Bullshit,” Holly said.
Kaylee sat back in her chair, eyes hollow, as if genuinely disturbed that her relationship with Holly was ruined. Holly didn’t believe it for a second.
Then Kaylee put her elbows on the desk. “If you don’t want to be part of the casino right now, we’ll respect that. I’m very disappointed. You’re putting all of us in danger. I still have to respect it. But you’ll have to stay away from the Res”—she counted on one finger—“and stay away from Elijah.” She counted on a second finger. “Keep in mind how he manipulated you. That’s what he’ll do to you, times a hundred, if you end up at the Res together. They’ll make you turn on each other, and then they’ll use you both to take the whole casino down.” She glanced at a monitor and exclaimed, “Oh! Speak of the devil.”
Holly understood it wasn’t a good strategy to leap forward and dive halfway across Kaylee’s desk to get a glimpse of Elijah on the monitor, thus revealing to Kaylee how deep her feelings for him ran. However, this was what she did. She was rewarded with a low-resolution image of him crossing the casino floor and slipping onto an empty stool at his mom’s blackjack table.
If Kaylee hadn’t pointed him out, Holly might not have seen him—he could have been any tall athlete with a mess of wavy hair—but she recognized the way he walked and the familiar movements of his hands as he fingered the cards his mom dealt him. He wasn’t the domineering man shouting at her in Shane’s car anymore. He was the boy she’d always known. He was her high school sweetheart.
She and Kaylee both jerked to attention as the office door banged open.
“You need a haircut.”
Elijah stopped short in the middle of the casino floor. He’d just come through the door with his sights on his mom behind a blackjack table. He’d waded through the flashing lights and tinkling sounds of the slot machines and the usual morass of other people’s thoughts, which were giving him a worse than usual headache on top of the pain Shane had given him in the back of the head. Suddenly this very clear message drowned out everyone else.
He watched his mom. She swept up the cards, dealt another hand to herself and a man in blue scrubs at her table, and never glanced up at Elijah.
“Well, who do you think is talking to you in your own mind?”
Now she looked up at him and winked.
He took a few bills from his wallet, tossed them down in the box, and seated himself a careful distance away from the man in scrubs.
His mom dealt new cards to Elijah, the man, and herself. “Mind-readers can only read what’s at the front of someone’s mind, on the tip of the tongue,” she told him telepathically. “Form a thought as if you were going to say it, and I can pick it up. Be clear, though. Female mind-readers aren’t as strong as males, and everybody’s power gets weaker as we grow older. Sometimes I have trouble.”